Gold Cure

From gold rushes to black gold, these elegiac poems place a glimmering mirror between resource extraction and utopian dreaming, exploitation and emotional longing. Lustrous, tender, and expansive, Gold Cure moves from boomtown gold mines and the mythical city of El Dorado to the fracking wells of the American interior, excavating buried histories, legacies of conquest, and the pursuit of shimmering ideals. Ted Mathys skewers police brutality in a 16-part poem built on the bones of a nursery rhyme and drives Petrarchan sonnets into shale fields deep under the prairies. In crystalline language rich with allegory and wordplay, Mathys has crafted a moving elegy for the Anthropocene.

About the Author :
Ted Mathys is the author of three previous books of poetry, Null Set, The Spoils, and Forge, all from Coffee House Press. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poetry Society of America, his work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Conjunctions, PBS NewsHour and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Saint Louis, where he teaches at Saint Louis University and curates the 100 Boots Poetry Series at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Review :
Praise for Gold Cure "The elegiac fourth collection from Mathys (Null Set) draws on the associative powers of gold: fake cures, busted boom towns, fracking sites, and goldfish (live and edible). . . . In these imaginative and linguistically impressive political poems, Mathys excavates with ironic wit while addressing untapped American fears." --Publishers Weekly "The poems in Ted Mathys's marvelous and riveting new collection pass a momentary blade across our vision so that we see again with renewed sight." --Arthur Sze "From the mythical excesses of El Dorado, to the goldfish crackers his daughter hoards, Mathys's Gold Cure takes his reader on an emotional journey through the perplexing landscape of contemporary America, where all that glitters is not, well, you know. . . . Syntactically dense, bright with topic-specific diction and surprising similes, these narrative poems--in both line and prose--explore the way desire crashes into the material world. Thanks to Mathys's skilled image-making, you may find yourself trapped in the bottom of a mineshaft, or catapulted up to the stars." --Jennifer Moxley "In this expansive and deeply moral book, Ted Mathys performs an extended meditation on gold's long relationship to colonialism, capitalism, and our baser human instincts, the way they fuel empire's ruthless expansion and economic exploitation. From mythic El Dorado to today's frack pads, our poet tracks greed, decries the accrual of power, and foils gold's capacity to enchant, all while also acknowledging the amplitude of its lure. . . . A thorough diagnosis of our moment, this bold book shivers with the fevers that have seized the demos and attempts a purgative cure of its imperilment." --Brian Teare "In this glittering collection, Ted Mathys embarks on an intimate, artful, and urgent transvaluation of values for our failed utopia. Mathys adopts gold--in all of its economic, formal, and historical modes of circulation--as a medium for the alchemical search into what underwrites 'the gold standard, the golden ratio, the golden hour.' Wherever this inner El Dorado may be, Mathys reflects, 'it passes through me / like wind through a screen, leaving only / a vague remainder, this dull glow-- / hard to locate in the body--that aches / for an answer just out of reach.' --Srikanth Reddy